Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title:
Hypothesis Only Baselines in Natural Language Inference

Abstract: We propose a hypothesis only baseline for diagnosing Natural Language
Inference (NLI). Especially when an NLI dataset assumes inference is occurring
based purely on the relationship between a context and a hypothesis, it follows
that assessing entailment relations while ignoring the provided context is a
degenerate solution. Yet, through experiments on ten distinct NLI datasets, we
find that this approach, which we refer to as a hypothesis-only model, is able
to significantly outperform a majority class baseline across a number of NLI
datasets. Our analysis suggests that statistical irregularities may allow a
model to perform NLI in some datasets beyond what should be achievable without
access to the context.